It is a weird feeling I had from my personal experience with working in, and teaching technology to some extent, and that I feel I am not the only one experiencing with the current AI hype. It is said everywhere that AI agents will replace small intellectual workers soon enough as they are able to do more work more efficiently, or so say some people. Open Linkedin and you will be flooded with posts of people telling you that what will make the difference is « those that learn to master the tools to do the work », illustrated with images that look like bad collages of random Shutterstock images containing weird incomprehensible text such as « Univervtut Californim ».
Everybody outraged by such a perspective cries out that « LLM will always stay mediocre at best at specific tasks! » or that « The human element will always be needed to treat special cases that do not appear in training data! » or whatever. Because who the fuck cares? You know what already set the bar of work super low while promising ultra high results in the previous era?
Microsoft Fucking Excel
This is not to say the usual « Who ho ho you should use Free software! Microsoft is evil! By the way do you know that Free, is like Freedom and not Free Beer ah ah! Free yourself now from capitalism and the industry, come and walk bare foot in the liberty of coding and… shit I am imitating Stallman again. ». We are past that point since a long time ago. The industry is now deeply poisoned with the spreadsheet virus up to a point it became comical.
Everything was Excel, from ERP in the industry to patients tracking at the NHS. This piece of shit of a software demonstrated how inefficient it is nearly on a daily bases in the news and yet, everything is still fucking Excel. Your HR probably tracks your career in an Excel spreadsheet with your name as a filename. Some of my colleague use Excel to count how many hours they have to declare. God damn I even had to fill a fucking Excel form sent by the ministry of defense to ask if some candidate could… actually apply to a PhD offer we were not sure about the funding of (that is for another time). There are other professional software out there, but Excel is always nearby, it is the fucking herpes of computers. Even if you don’t have it, some colleague will send you a fucking .xlsx file for something that could be done faster, better and in an easier way with any other format (like text file 90% of the time) and you will have to deal with it. For some people, « using a computer to so something » is synonymous to « using Excel to do it ».
And there is a reason Excel is everywhere now and that is not only that Microsoft pushed for the use of Office, it is also in the very nature of Excel: it gives you the feeling that you can do anything with it. Jack of all trades, master of shit indeed, but jack of all trades none the less. And it gave many chief officer the feeling that everything is now easy to do with a computer. But guess what?
Training was optional
How have you learned to use Excel initially? Or most software? That is, before getting classes on the topic? Have you also been lucky enough for a colleague to teach you about advanced functionality? Did you learn common caveats by trial and error? Has anyone told you about keyboards shortcuts or are you still clicking with your mouse with your eyes glued on your screen searching for the good menu to click on? And making your selection with your mouse like… whoohoo that is a very long selection you’re making here… yep that’s long… oh too bad you miss clicked and have to do it all over again. Too. Bad.
You definitely know what I am talking about here. Most Excel users do not use advanced features. They don’t even know about them, and that got worst with the so called « digital native » generation and the assumption that « if computer existed at a time you were born, then you should natively have an instinctive understanding on how they work at a high level of abstraction and be able to do anything with it ». For some time, that high level of abstraction was reading what was written on the fucking screen or in the fucking manual and reboot the fucking modem by turning it on and off (« Yes mom, the internet is back on. »), now it is basically reading your text messages (« No mom, this is advertisement. »). If you can do both of this things properly you are, literally, a « power-user ». This is common experience to people not afraid to interact with the machine and understand how it should be used, but this is not the majority of people. Most user just want to use it for leisure and to do work, the way of use is of no interest.
The result is that many people use computers in the cumbersome way they managed to find to get from point A (work not done) to point B (work done). It is not efficient, it is slow, it is error prone, it is the Excel way, and it is enough. If that is the quality you got out of Excel then your chief officers will be happy with it. You couldn’t do faster and better, you used Excel for fuck sake! And more, you can share your spreadsheets with them and they’ll make very nice PPT presentation to explain how work is going on. I am sarcastic here, we all know how PowerPoint has been a wrecking ball for meeting usefulness.
But you know what could have make work easier? Which piece of software could have made the workplace a better place to be? A 4h time span per day and then we could all go home and do whatever we want instead of working, because work would have been done?
Microsoft Fucking Excel
And this is how things started. Did you know that most boring tasks in company could be automated? And do you know how we automate things with a computer? Using algorithms: see this, do that. See that, do this etc.
And do you know which software is shipped with a programming language that was designed to be used by people not that skilled in programming? That’s right, Excel. But not only Excel now. The whole Office pack comes with VBA. That is you can automate the generation of a graph in Excel and send it directly to your PPT presentation or Word document using VBA. Imagine how the world would be if you could just scan through some spreadsheet, formalize what you have to do on a regular basis, program it so it comes out without a mistake and BANG your done. That’s what most people should actually do with a computer right? Or at least be able to do.
That is the theory.
In practice VBA is clunky and hard to learn. It has a very complicated way of reading and writing files. Most people have very few incentive to learn programming and use computer to watch cat videos on the internet, write emails, write word documents… and of course, use Excel the rest of the time (actual work). In the end from what I’ve seen, most people do not use computers efficiently. And it is not about blaming anyone. I too, had to learn most things I do, and I am not efficient.
An you guess who is not efficient? That’s right: AI agents, especially LLM agents. And you know which language ChatGPT for example is especially bad at producing? Yep, VBA.
I had to teach a class of VBA to some students were I work, and what I told them is « You don’t need to master the thing. Get the basics. Work your way with some of it. At some point you’ll be <that person who knows a bit of VBA> in the company, and you’ll have the opportunity to either be very efficient with Excel and what the company wants to do with is, or maintain the pace by keeping some code up to date. » (I know at least one of my students listened with both ears opened.)
The thing is, the reason everyone is impressed by current state of the art AI, is because the industry runs on mediocre work, and I stand by that. A personal rule of thumb is that around 50% people do most of the work, and among them 50% are so efficient that everything holds despite most of the workforce being inefficient. The benefits, however, is not proportional to the actual quality of the work, but hey, isn’t capitalism motto « Our profits, your loss »? Mediocre work is enough to keep the industry running. So AI shit shall also be enough, right?
I’m not sure about that.
Fuck conclusions
Contrary to Excel, you can’t use AI agents to « do stuff » in a clunky way. They hallucinate by design, they produce shit even more slowly than actual workers, they are a shitty solution to a problem that does not exist. It is still a bubble from which everyone tries to get some of the fruits. But the burst might be brutal.
As I told my students, it is the occasion to learn the critical skills even more. Instead of being the person that « knows how to use AI to leverage their work », be the person people ask for when « ChatGPT told me a solution, it doesn’t work and I don’t know why ».
Be the person who knows how the fucking VBA subroutine works.